Research: State of the IT Service Desk

Infrastructure changes, customer satisfaction, process improvement, service-level achievement, performance management, cost reduction, security... Historically, these topics have dominated IT support managers' day-to-day routines. Traditional IT service and technical support responsibilities and methodologies are on the edge of obsolescence. For example, users are not seeking out the service desk portal for support, they are utilizing blogs, vendor and user online support sites, and social and informal networks; third parties are continuing to provide more resolutions to users. IT support organizations need to continue to re-evaluate their service offerings and the impact of these offerings on business goals, and ensure that their services provide value to the business.

In April 2011, InformationWeek Analytics and HDI surveyed 1,214 business technology and service management professionals to determine the current state of the IT service desk. Many of the emerging trends identified by respondents are spreading in influence among support organizations that report increasing incident volume as well as those with decreasing incident volume; nevertheless, these trends are not yet the operational norm. And, in keeping with the trends reported in the past three annual HDI Support Center Practices & Salary Reports, the rate of increase for incident volume is slowing.

The primary reason for call-volume increases continues to be change-related: new hardware, new mobile devices, new applications, new infrastructure architecture and more customers. Service desks continue to focus on IT-related and process-based metrics versus metrics that demonstrate the value the service desk adds to business processes and how the service desk contributes to the achievement of business goals. Based on the rate of framework and methodology adoption reported by survey respondents, IT support management needs to better understand and leverage service management frameworks, standards and practices to better align service offerings with customer needs. (R2790611)

Survey Name: InformationWeek Analytics/HDI 2011 State of the IT Service Desk SurveySurvey Date: April 2011Region: North AmericaNumber of Respondents: 1,214